Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Someone had rung from Germany an hour ago, said Giovanni. As far as he had understood, it had been Perlmann’s daughter.

Perlmann immediately called Kirsten.

‘You were away for a long time,’ she said. ‘Do you often go out with your group?’

She was nervous about her presentation. Only one more week. She was desperate about Faulkner’s remark that the relationship between the two stories was one of musical counterpoint. From one day to the next she found the various theories about the unity of the whole more and more incomprehensible. She wondered whether, contrary to most interpreters, she should claim that the unity didn’t exist at all. Or, at best, only in Faulkner’s mind. She didn’t have time to write out a whole paper, she would have to make do with detailed notes.

‘What do you do if you have a blackout and suddenly don’t know what to say?’

‘You won’t have one,’ said Perlmann, and heard how disappointed she was by his silly answer.

Wednesday was a radiant late autumn day with a horizon that dissolved into a dreamlike haze. When Perlmann got up from his desk and looked down at the terrace he saw Millar and Ruge, who had sat down to one side at a table full of books and papers preparing the next two sessions. Once he stepped to the window just as John Smith was approaching them with an affable gesture. Millar’s reaction was plainly so unfriendly that Smith immediately turned on his heels and trotted over to the pool.

The translation was coming on nicely, and Perlmann was becoming practiced at quickly retreating behind his fortress of dictionaries after looking out of the window. He would have liked to walk over to the window less often; but there wasn’t much to be done. When he had finished a paragraph, he picked up the Russian-Italian dictionary as a reward and translated some of Leskov’s easier sentences into Italian. Then he imagined sitting in a circular room whose walls were filled to the top with dictionaries. He would walk along these walls and translate more and more new sentences into more and more new languages. There was no reason ever to leave this room, because this was the place where he found his actual will. Here, after more than three decades, he could roll back the misunderstanding that he had become aware of back then in the Auditorium Maximum, without recognizing it or being able to keep it from unfolding.

At noon he went to see Maria in the office and asked her the Italian word for self-image . To explain to her that he didn’t mean autoritratto , self-portrait , he sketched out something of Leskov’s train of thought. She was immediately gripped by the subject and kept asking him questions until he had given her an outline of the whole text.

‘So that’s what they’re talking about on the veranda!’ she said at last, and choked on her smoke. ‘I wish I could listen in!’

He hastily turned towards her screen and asked straight away if that way of writing wasn’t tiring on the eyes after a while.

Now came the four sentences in Leskov’s text that had hitherto been a complete puzzle to him. With the help of the new dictionary they were soon translated. But it was a long time before Perlmann had worked out the concise and awkwardly phrased argument for the necessary linguistic nature of self-images.

Seeing a past action as meaningful meant attributing reasons for it to one’s past self. But reasons related to one another as only sentences can. Hence the differentiation of the self-image that bore the memory was possible only through language.

It was a strikingly simple thought, and at first sight it seemed telling. But when Perlmann lay down on his bed to rest, his doubts began to accumulate. Was it true that one considered oneself in the light of one’s reasons when one looked back? And what did the internal wrangling which – at least for him – tended to precede an important action, have to do with logical relationships between sentences? Not to mention all the ambiguities and dichotomies that ran through the emotional life, and which one sometimes remembered very clearly. Again he saw himself standing in the empty train compartment, looking at the thalidomide children and then stepping on to the platform, into the echoing voice of the loudspeaker and the unfamiliar smells.

Suddenly, Leskov’s train of thought seemed to collapse like a house of cards, and when he began translating again he felt sobriety, almost reluctance. But that passed quickly when he managed some elegant English sentences, and in the course of that afternoon he understood that apart from joy in the sensuality of language there was also something else that drew him irresistibly to translation: one could think without having to believe anything, and one could speak, without having to assert anything. One could deal with language, without having to be concerned about the truth. For a man with no opinions, like myself, translator or interpreter would have been the ideal profession. The ideal disguise.

When Perlmann next looked down at Millar and Ruge, von Levetzov was sitting at the table as well. There was a hurricane lamp between the papers, and the waiter was arranging the cable of the standard lamp, which he must just have put there. From time to time, Millar rubbed his bare forearms, before starting to speak again, making energetic gestures. Now Ruge shook his head, picked up a sheet of paper and held it up in front of Millar’s nose with two fingers like a search warrant, as the American went on speaking.

At that moment Perlmann knew that he would never, never again, want to take part in a debate. He didn’t want to be attacked ever again, and never again did he want to have to defend an opinion that was no more his own than was any other opinion.

Now he couldn’t find his way into Leskov’s text. The words he had written out over the last hour seemed to be extinguished within his head, and his vocabulary book struck him as the symbol of eternal homework which one would never finish, however long one lived. When he got a Cyrillic letter wrong twice in a row, he realized that he had had enough. He had thought he was on his way to see Maria to ask her about the lovely old fountain that he had stood by for a long time in Genoa two days previously, before he discovered the bookshop in the next street.

But then he found himself in the corridor at the end of which was Evelyn Mistral’s room and, after a brief hesitation, he knocked.

She had really organized her room. While up in his own, his unpacked suitcase and the plastic bag of dirty laundry stood under bare walls and his coat lay on his unused bed, here everything was tidy and inhabitable. She had put her second bedside table next to the desk as a storage space, and although there were stacks of paper and books lying around all over the place, it didn’t look chaotic. On the walls there were two posters of Rome and Florence and a row of photographs. Push pins weren’t permitted, she laughed, but Signora Morelli had allowed her to use them. She stood for a remarkably long time in the corner by the window, and when he looked towards the photograph behind her head she became embarrassed and held her hand over it. It was a picture of her dog Totó.

‘And he’s been dead for a year,’ she said. ‘Crazy, isn’t it?’

Perlmann sat down at the antique table with the ornate legs, and looked at her across the bunch of flowers. If she had – that night in that huge kitchen in Salamanca – understood her father’s problem, then she could understand his misery now; in spite of the silver glasses that lay on an open book on the desk in the beam of light from the lamp. He smiled, and when he then took a deep breath, it was like a long run-up to something risky.